Anne Lewis is an independent filmmaker, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, and a member of the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU-CWA Local 6186) and NABET-CWA. She has been making documentary films since 1970. Most of her filmmaking depicts working class people -- often women -- fighting for social change. Lewis is associated with Appalshop, an arts and education center located in the heart of Appalachia. On the show, Anne also addresses recent developments at UT-Austin, where she teaches. University president Bill Powers has made radical proposals to "increase efficiency" at the the school, in part by privatizing much of the university staff, drawing strong reaction from the university community.
Lewis is co-director of the 2012 film, "Anne Braden: Southern Patriot," a first-person documentary about the extraordinary life of the American civil rights leader who was a target of Sen. Joe McCarthy and was called "eloquent and prophetic" by the late Dr. Martin Luther King. Anne was also associate director of "Harlan County, U.S.A," and the producer/director of "Fast Food Women," "To Save the Land and People," "Morristown: in the air and sun," and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. She was associate director/assistant camera for "Harlan County, USA," the Academy Award-winning documentary, which focused on the Brookside, Kentucky, strike of 1975. After the strike, Lewis moved to the coalfields where she lived for 25 years.
Folksinger and civil rights activist Joan Baez called "Anne Braden: Southern Patriot" "...a gem of a film, accented with freedom fighters who speak firsthand about carving a path through a traumatized, violent, racist South, to make way for one of the largest and most effective nonviolent movements for social change the world has ever seen."
This show includes fundraising pitches for KOOP's spring membership drive. The Rag Blog's William Michael Hanks, a former documentary filmmaker, participates in the interview.
Host and Producer of Rag Radio: Thorne Dreyer; Engineer and Co-Producer: Tracey Schulz. Rag Radio (koop.org/ragradio) is produced in the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer, cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas, in association with The Rag Blog (theragblog.blogspot.com) and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The show is broadcast (and streamed) live Fridays, 2-3 p.m. (Central) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA., Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern time). Contact: ragradio@koop.org. Running time: 51:47.